Iran In Trouble After The Fall Of Assad?

ꦉEarly December a video of a woman with curly hair shouting “Women, Life, Freedom! Freedom is our right!” as she is brought out of an ambulance on a stretcher was widely shared on social media. The video was shot when Narges Mohammadi, a 52-year-old Iranian woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 for opposing capital punishment and mandatory dress codes for women, was released on parole for medical treatment. She had been sentenced by the Islamic Republic of Iran to 154 lashes and 10 years and nine months in prison for "acts against national security" and "propaganda against the state."

♉In Iran, the sight of a woman’s hair in public invites, besides imprisonment, corporal punishment sanctioned by the law—sometimes leading to feminicide such as that of Jina Mahsa Amini. A 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Amini was allegedly beaten to death in Tehran on September 16, 2022, by the Guidance Patrol, the morality police that had accused her of not hiding her hair “properly” under the hijab (Islamic headscarf) in accordance with the Islamic Republic’s legal standards.

♏Amini’s custodial death triggered the resurrection of Iran’s indigenous feminist movement after supporters of the Kurdish freedom movement took to the streets in the Persian-speaking-Shia-dominated country that has different laws for men and women causing Iranian critics of the Ayatollah’s regime to famously call the system “gender apartheid”. The protestors picked up a Kurdish slogan—“Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” (woman, life, freedom)—coined by the movement led by the outlawed Workers Party of Kurdistan (PKK) in Turkey to summarise the ideology systematised by PKK co-founder Abdullah Ocalan in his legal defence documents penned in his one-man prison on Imrali island in the Sea of Marmara where he has been held since 1999 after being forced to leave Syria the previous year.

🌄Many like Mohammadi were arrested during the protests, including journalists Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi (for their reporting on the protests in September 2022), who were released just before her. “People in Iran continue to endure the devastating consequences of the authorities’ brutal crackdown on the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ uprising amid systematic impunity for crimes under international law,” Amnesty International noted in September this year. Iranian activists say the grave human rights violations by the authorities and their crimes under international law have not been investigated impartially. In fact, the authorities have only doubled down on enforcement of the compulsory veiling laws as well as the death penalty to silence dissent.

🍌Despite the crackdown, “the movement worked like a solidarity network,” says Tehran-based journalist and researcher Shima Vezvaei, who has advocated for the rights of women, children and migrants for the past 10 years. “None of the many uprisings in Iran in the past 15 years worked like the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, which was the first to be centered around liberation. It brought marginalised communities together to demand radical changes in all aspects of life and push for tangible political change. Going beyond bodily autonomy and freedom of choice in clothing, it changed the discourse of women’s rights regarding political participation and resisting all forms of gender-based violence. The patriarchal norms are no longer taken for granted.”

🍌Indeed, a few days after pushing for a stricter hijab law, the regime paused it in early December as “not feasible at the moment”. Iran’s “pro-reform” president Masoud Pezeshkian, too, had rejected the penalties proposed in the bill. Even some religious leaders said it could encourage “anti-religious sentiment”. The bill envisaged fines of $800 for the first offence, $1,500 for the second and 15 years in prison for the third. Celebrities and public figures could have eight per cent of their net worth confiscated, while businesses could face fines and shutdowns for serving women not wearing a headscarf. 

🦹Another factor that brought down the bill was the fall of the Baathist Arab regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria despite the Islamic Republic of Iran’s efforts to prop it up against the uprising that began in 2011. This big blow to its foreign policy, coupled with the huge setbacks faced in the past year or so of war by both Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shiite outfit directly controlled from Tehran, and the Palestine-based Islamist resistance group Hamas, left the regime in Tehran too vulnerable to weather another storm on the domestic front.

♈As Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni Islamist paramilitary organisation formed in 2017 with the coming together of several such older armed outfits involved in the Syrian civil war such as Jaysh al-Ahrar, a faction of Ahrar al-Sham, took over the Syrian capital Damascus, on December 8, the regime in Iran found itself at its lowest ebb. Iran’s Islamic Republic had in partnership with Assad’s Baathist Arab regime built what they call an “axis of resistance” against Israel involving a coalition of West Asian paramilitary outfits such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthi (or Ansar Allah), a Zaydi Shiite organisation that emerged in Yemen in the 1990s.

🌄While the Islamic Republic’s “supreme leader” Ali Khamenei had vowed to “end the Israeli occupation” of Palestine by 2040, this “axis” had helped the regime project its authority as far as the Mediterranean. With the fall of Assad, Iran lost an important geographical link that allowed it to move weapons and other supplies to Hezbollah in Lebanon.  The militias in Iraq and Yemen are not strategically important in the offensive against Israel, with the Houthis posing a greater threat to Saudi Arabia than to Israel and the West. 

💞“Hamas is badly battered in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon,” says Alvite Ningthoujam, assistant professor at Pune’s Symbiosis School of International Studies. “Despite its military capabilities including the use of missiles and drones, Hezbollah’s strategic depth has majorly waned with the assassination of its third secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah and other leaders. With Assad falling without much resistance, the strategic depth Iran had been flexing for years, with very resolute proxies spread across the region, is coming up for a challenge now.” 

♔In the backdrop of these foreign policy setbacks, the Iranian regime is also facing people’s resistance against proposed hikes in petrol prices, slow economic growth and the growing number of judicial executions. The proposed hijab law could have exacerbated the situation. For the 85-year-old “supreme leader” ruling Iran since 1989, the conditions have never been worse and the discontent, even among the champions of the regime, is at its peak. President Pezeshkian is facing pressure to demonstrate what reforms he has introduced. Human rights groups believe the number of executions has not come down. In 2024 alone, 798 people were executed. 

🦂On the economic front, the Iranian rial is officially one of the least-valued currencies in the world. Economic sanctions, unemployment, poverty and malnutrition are huge issues. Most citizens want the government to focus on fixing internal issues and are, therefore, sceptical of its ambitious foreign policy. It was in the face of many such challenges at home that a reformist president was appointed, hoping he would prioritise stability and economic well-being. However, people today doubt whether the country is anywhere closer to either goal. Pezeshkian did reach out to the US and European countries on nuclear matters, besides talking of economic cooperation, but didn’t find much success with many blaming Israel for aiming to prevent Iran’s engagement with the US. 

♑The main centre of authority, however, remains with the “supreme leader”, widely acknowledged as a very conservative force. He looks very frail though and finding a successor would likely be a challenge. “With an ailing supreme leader and an unsuccessful president, Iran is a geopolitical wreck,” says former diplomat Talmiz Ahmad, an expert on West Asian affairs. “Iran is also facing other serious social and cultural issues. Hijab and safeguarding the 1979 Revolution’s Islamic identity have been the priorities despite their utter irrelevance in world affairs today. This has alienated large sections of people at home and abroad. The regime’s base of support has narrowed down.”

🐎According to Ningthoujam, the pressure of economic sanctions on people’s lives has made the moderates believe it’s time to consider national development over interference in the affairs of other countries. A 2018 report of the US State Department stated that Iran had paid Assad $14 billion since 2011, while independent observers peg it at almost $30 billion. Besides supplying arms to Hezbollah and other Islamist outfits in Lebanon, Iran has sent aid worth around $77 million for people affected by the Israeli bombing since Nasrallah’s death in an air strike on September 27 this year. 

🍸The war between Israel and Lebanon was an extension of the ongoing Gaza offensive in which 45,000 Palestinian civilians, mainly women and children, lost their lives so far following the attack on Israel by Hamas October 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were reportedly killed and many taken hostage.

The History Of Iran’s Conflict With Israel 

🥃Though the Iranian groups opposed to the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s regime had already established ties with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and received military training from the PLO militants, Iran’s state support for the Palestinian movement began only after the Shah was deposed in 1979 and the Islamic Republic established under its first “supreme leader” Ayatollah Khomeini. “Khomeini based his politics on two things: Shiite Islam and support for the oppressed. Supporting Palestine and opposing Israel were a part of the revolution’s identity,” says former diplomat Ahmad. 

꧟For politicians in Iran, Israel’s war on Palestinians strengthens the narrative of resistance against “Zionism and colonialism” across the region, which is reflected also in growing political engagement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. “As Iran’s support for Palestinians resonates well with the citizens of Arab-majority countries despite their past differences with Iran, ‘normalisation’ with Israel will be on the back burner,” says Ahmad. “Iran’s engagement with Saudi Arabia will persist. The shock across the Arab world due to the devastation of Palestine will prevent the regimes from being too cozy with Israel, at least not overtly.’’

ꩵAccording to both Ahmad and Ningthoujam, the return of Donald J. Trump, a staunch ally of Benjamin Netanyahu and opponent of Iran, as President of the United States of America also poses a big challenge. Trump recently said he is “weighing options to stop Iran from being able to build nuclear weapons’’, signalling sanctions and diplomacy might not be enough and hinting at the possibility of preventive air strikes. “The only thing that might work in favour of Iran is that it still holds the card of its nuclear programme,” says Ningthoujam.

🗹The USA’s support to Israel despite the unparalleled destruction of life and property in Gaza continues to be a cementing factor for the Muslims of the world in general, and on Iran’s call, for the Shias in particular. In fact, even the Iranians opposing their government support its stand on Gaza and the “liberation of Palestine”. “Of course, I support Palestinian liberation just like all the world’s free and progressive people and collectives who are now demanding an end to the bloodshed and wars worldwide,” says Vezvaei.